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You don't have to sign up for any podcasts. You just sign up and start receiving recommendations. At first, recommendations are free or virtually free for the p
by mcbits 8y ago
You don't have to sign up for any podcasts. You just sign up and start receiving recommendations. At first, recommendations are free or virtually free for the podcaster, since there is no data about your interests. You start accepting the ones that interest you and rejecting the ones that don't.
Podcasters get access to the entire data set for every listener and can run clustering and regression to their hearts' content. As you listen to podcasts and perhaps rate them, the cost to target you (i.e. your random ID) goes up because the podcasters have better data to work with and should know better than to send you politics podcasts when all you listen to is vampire erotica.
If you become a listener, then they've acquired a listener and you've acquired a podcast that you like. If you're not interested, then they pay the cost of poor targeting, and you are compensated for the inconvenience. Proper incentives all around!
The net cost to the podcaster doesn't have to be $0 for the service to be worthwhile. It only has to be more effective than AdWords and other venues where they pay to expose themselves.
- ryanwaggoner 8y agoSorry, this would never work. Maybe if Apple launched this so that you had already overcome chicken and the egg. But I’d never ever sign up for this as a podcaster (or any kind of audience builder) unless there was literally no other choice because that’s where ALL the listeners are. Even then, I’d probably just do something else rather than allow some sleazy middle-man to screw me over while trying to connect with my fans. You’re totally missing the point that podcasts are pull, not push. I listen to dozens of them, none of them have ever “spammed” me. That literally makes no sense. I subscribed to them. There’s no way for them to push their podcast on someone who doesn’t want it.
- mcbits 8y agoIt's not a chicken-and-egg problem. Clearly, building the audience is the harder problem and the priority. When you have an audience, podcasters pay to reach that audience, which is usually done by pestering people with web ads until they install an ad blocker or by hiring sleazy "PR consultants" to spam the ratings and reviews and social media. This would just cut out those middlemen and compensate the audience directly whenever the messaging misses the mark.
- ryanwaggoner 8y agoNo users will sign up for a podcast app / network that has no podcasters on it. And no podcasters are going to pay to reach a non-existent userbase.
- mcbits 8y agoYou're in such a rush to shoot down the idea that you haven't taken 3 seconds to realize how trivial it is to create a podcast site/app with thousands of podcasts but no users. Users are the chicken and the egg, just as they are for the podcasters who spend more time and money on audience-building than on podcasting.